Computational and experimental pragmatics

Lundi 01 Octobre 2018, 14:00 to 16:00
Invité: 
Roger Levy (MIT)
Organisation: 
Benoît Crabbé (LLF)
Lieu: 

Université Paris-Diderot – Bâtiment des grands Moulins – Salle 191C

Roger Levy (MIT)
Computational and experimental pragmatics

In constructing theories of linguistic meaning in context it has been productive to distinguish between strictly semantic content, or the “literal” meanings of atomic expressions (e.g., words) and the rules of meaning composition, and pragmatic enrichment, by which speakers and listeners can rely on general principles of cooperative communication to take understood communicative intent far beyond literal content. Major open questions remain, however, of how to formalize pragmatic inference and characterize its relationship with semantic composition. In this lecture I describe recent work within a Bayesian framework of interleaved semantic composition and pragmatic inference. First I show how two major principles of Levinson’s typology of conversational implicature fall out of our models: Q(uantity) implicature, in which utterance meaning is refined through exclusion of the meanings of alternative utterances; and I(nformativeness) implicature, in which utterance meaning is refined by strengthening to the prototypical case. Q and I are often in tension; I show that the Bayesian approach derives quantitative predictions regarding their relative strength in interpretation of a given utterance, and present evidence supporting these predictions from a large-scale experiment. I then describe more complex applications of the theory to key cases of compositionality, focusing on two of the most fundamental building blocks of semantic composition, the words “and” and “or”.